Free The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle by Francisco Goldman

outside rang with riled shouts. No serious future biography of Enrique Peña Nieto or history of his presidency will be able to avoid mentioning that second-floor men’s room.
    That Peña Nieto seems to have a dark personal history—that is, there are many rumors—is not unusual for a Mexican politician, especially one who rose to power within the PRI. But even for a politician, he does seem unusually callow. He was especially mocked for his performance the previous November at the Guadalajara book fair: when asked which three books had most influenced him, he could name only the Bible and, after much stammering, the novel The Eagle’s Seat , which he misattributed to Enrique Krauze. He had probably never even read that, because the novel, by Carlos Fuentes, about the Machiavellian manipulations of a cynical Mexican PRI politician, suggests that Salinas, Peña Nieto’s supposed mentor, may have been behind the 1994 assassination of the reformist PRI candidate Donaldo Colosio. While Peña Nieto was being widely ridiculed for his gaffe at the world’s largest Spanish-language book fair, his daughter sent out a tweet describing her father’s critics as pendejos (assholes), and proles (proletarians), whose derision was motivated by envy. When that tweet provoked a further media uproar, the candidate, trying to win an election in a country with tens of millions of prole voters largely indifferent to his reading habits, was forced to publicly apologize for his daughter. The horrific violence of Mexico’s narco war is, of course, intimately tied to the political corruption that is the PRI’s seemingly ineradicable institutional legacy. To fight endemic lawlessness, Mexico needs leaders committed to lawfulness. Now Mexico has a president who has publicly defended murder and rape as legitimate uses of force.
    Peña Nieto’s calamitous “Black Friday” visit to La Ibero made news all over Latin America, though on Televisa that night it wasn’t even mentioned. Almost immediately following the incident, spokesmen for the PRI and other allies began putting out the claim, widely publicized by their supporters in the media, that the young people who had rowdily repudiated the president-in-waiting had in fact been not Ibero students but outsiders: porros, trained agitators infiltrated by his leftist electoral opponent, López Obrador, and by the PRD. Of course the ordinary Mexican media consumer would have no reason to doubt such claims. In response, during the next few days, an Ibero student requested over social media that other students make videos, and instructed them on what those videos should say. He received 131 videos that he edited into one and posted on YouTube. The video showed Ibero students, one after the other, avowing that they’d participated in the protest; saying, “Nobody trained us for anything” and speaking their names, displaying their university ID cards, and enunciating their ID numbers. Students at other universities, already intrigued by the reports of the incident at La Ibero—nobody had expected such an outbreak from a fresa school (a “rich kid” school) without any history of political organizing or agitation—took notice, and the video spread swiftly throughout the student and academic communities of Mexico and beyond, even becoming a YouTube “worldwide trending topic.” Student bloggers pondered the meaning of what had occurred at La Ibero, and the opportunities it might offer. The July 1 elections were only a little more than two months away. Was there anything that students could do, with so little time left, to stop Peña Nieto from becoming president? And whom should the students prefer instead? Many of Mexico’s leading activists, in the student community and outside it—including Javier Sicilia, an eminent poet whose son was slain by narcos in Morelos and who afterward launched a popular civic crusade against the violence of Calderón’s war—had called on Mexicans to nullify